BEIJING - A rush by Chinese to gamble on World Cup results pushed up China's lottery sales sharply in June, according to official data released on Tuesday.
Sports lottery sales surged 83 percent from a year ago to reach 19.24 billion yuan (about $3.13 billion) last month, the Ministry of Finance (MOF) said in a statement on its website.
Outside of sporting bets, sales of welfare lottery tickets also rose 18.1 percent year on year to 16.81 billion yuan in June.
In total, China's lottery sales increased 19.2 percent year on year to 178.84 billion yuan in the first half of the year, the data showed.
Among Chinese provinces and cities, Beijing led the upsurge in June, with its lottery sales worth 1.3 billion yuan more than a year ago, while Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Tianjin also posted large increases, according to the MOF.
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263 Registration Number: 130349 
